Steve Tesich, 53, Whose Plays Plumbed the Nation's Identity

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Steve Tesich, the Yugoslav-born playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter whose popular movies and not-so-popular plays plumbed his own changing attitudes toward the United States, his adopted country, and Americans, died yesterday in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where he was vacationing with his family. He was 53 and had homes in Manhattan and Conifer, Colo.

The cause was a heart attack, said Sam Cohn, a longtime friend who was also his agent.

Mr. Tesich's most recent play, "Arts and Leisure," completed an Off Broadway run last month at Playwrights Horizons. The work, about a theater critic in life crisis, presented the main character satirically, as a representative American, one who lives life as a spectator or a member of the audience, unable to get truly involved. It was indicative of how time and politics had altered Mr. Tesich's view of the United States and its citizens since his plays first began to be produced in 1970, and since his most popular work, the 1979 film "Breaking Away," earned him his Oscar.

"Breaking Away" was about a group of teen-agers, post-high school "townies" in Bloomington, Ind., and their rivalry with the more privileged college students at nearby Indiana University. The climactic scene is a team bicycle race pitting the groups against each other, and the victory by the townies is sentimental and uplifting. The film's idyllic portrayal of a middle-American town, its lovable, idiosyncratic American characters and its sense of a dream being achieved were very much the product of a grateful writer who felt himself to be a welcomed outsider.

He was born Stoyan Tesich in Titovo Uzice, Yugoslavia on Sept. 29, 1942. His father, a professional soldier who opposed the ascendant Communist regime of Marshall Tito, fled the country after World War II, leaving Mr. Tesich and his older sister to be raised by their mother until the family could be reunited -- which it was, in East Chicago, Ind., in 1957, where his father worked as a machinist until he died five years later.

When he arrived in this country at 14, Mr. Tesich spoke no English, but it was the language itself, he once said, that helped push him into writing. "As soon as I started learning English," he said, "it was almost as though I had a tuning fork in me that could respond to the language and the country."

He attended Indiana University on a wrestling scholarship, though once there, his athletic interest turned to bicycling; like Dave, the hero of "Breaking Away," he was a racer. He majored in Russian literature, graduating in 1965, and moved on to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

It was in New York that he began writing plays, eventually turning his back on academia to do so. For a while he was a social worker in Brooklyn, and on the job he met Becky Fletcher, whom he married in 1971. Their daughter, Amy, is now 8.

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Mr. Tesich's first six plays were produced at the American Place Theater, beginning with "The Carpenters" in 1970. Written just after the turmoil of the 1960's (Mark Rudd, the Columbia University student organizer, was in Mr. Tesich's playwriting class), it used the demise of a family to represent the fragmenting of American society. Subsequent works, both dramas and comedies, were similarly laden with symbols and portentous language, but all conveyed a sense of the American ideal, a belief that America, at heart, is a welcoming place.

It was the play he wrote after "Breaking Away," called "Division Street," about a former radical trying without success to rid himself of the past, that contained the line: "I was born in the old country, but my dreams were born in America. The dream. . . . it lives!" It was his first play to appear on Broadway, and it was the last play he would write for nine years.

"That was still the dreamer Steve," Mr. Cohn said yesterday.

During most of the 1980's, he concentrated on films, and though his work never achieved the acclaim or notoriety of his debut, many of the movies were successful, including "Eyewitness" (1981) and an adaptation of the John Irving novel "The World According to Garp" (1982). He also wrote a novel of his own, "Summer Crossing" (1982).

Mr. Tesich returned to playwriting in 1989, but by then his attitude had changed to one of helpless outrage. His final plays, including "The Speed of Darkness," about the divergent fortunes of two Vietnam veterans and two futuristic parables; "Square One," about the dissolution of a marriage, and "On the Open Road," an end-of-the-world vision in which desperate survivors barter great artworks for safe passage to freedom, were full of regretful pessimism about an America retreating from the world and a national identity that seemed to trumpet selfishness as a virtue.

"I would say he became, not skeptical -- he adored this country," Mr. Cohn said, trying to explain the playwright's shift in perspective. "But his ideas became more abstract and his political views changed. It started with the Reagan era, and the situation in Yugoslavia had a profound effect on him."

In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by his mother, Rade Tesich of Chicago, and his sister, Gospava Bulaich, who is known as Nadja, of New York City.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on July 2, 1996, on Page A00012 of the National edition with the headline: Steve Tesich, 53, Whose Plays Plumbed the Nation's Identity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe